We've wandered mony a weary foot
by jomiddlemarch
Summary: The festivities were muted this year.


Perhaps she ought to chalk it up to the baby, the same one that made her lumber about from room to room like a great tree about to be felled, hardly able to keep up with Michael, who ran from about as if the hounds of hell were at his feet, and not his poor Mummy in her frumpy smock and shapeless skirt. There wasn't enough money to run to a nursery maid and no space to house one even if the coffers had been overflowing, so it was she alone who looked after Michael, day and night, and the house, and did what she could for Adam's career; whatever vocation she'd ever possessed that had been all her own was sadly in abeyance now, though she did try to keep abreast of the latest detective novels and anything in the paper that smacked of espionage or the criminal element. It was taking of all of Christopher's skill to keep his expression impassive when he came to tea these days, she knew it though she couldn't say how, and she bit her tongue when her temper was high and she was tempted to point out that his wife had had only the one child to deal with and he'd probably never seen the two of them wrangling before the bread-and-butter was served, only an angelic little Andrew in freshly laundered nightclothes, ready to be tucked in. She wished science would hurry up already and divine a way for women to have a bit more of a say over exactly how and when the babies came, though she always had a sort of a sharp pang, like a heroine in a novel, remembering the time before Michael, when she'd thought she'd never become a mother in the first place. It wasn't so long ago and the pain of the possible, likely, disappointment had been so vast, it wasn't so difficult to recall but it did seem, with every new scientific innovation, the continuation of the species could get some attention.

Even if there was another reason, she wouldn't bother about it; it was enough to blame the baby for the way her mind simply flew to Paul Milner when Adam toasted, "Absent friends" on New Year's Eve with the hardly-ruinous but still wonderfully luxurious split of Champagne. She was well aware that "absent friends" generally referred to people who had died and Paul was alive and if not kicking, then still careful and reliable, investigating all the crimes that the citizens of Brighton were committing and becoming a regular paterfamilias to a positive brood of little girls, all dark-haired and at least one the very image of him based on the last snap his wife had sent. They'd never quite gotten on, she and Edith Milner; Sam could never forgive or forget that Edith had believed Paul capable of murdering his wife, something he'd let slip one night after he'd married, happily this time. It was always just there, lurking around the edges of her psyche, if a psyche could be said to properly have edges. She still envisioned her mind more as a great map, with roads and by-ways, hedgerows narrow and filled with bees in the summer, a few precarious, crumbling bridges. Rather more crumbling seemed to come with the maternal state but the map itself had grown larger, a fair enough exchange.

She hadn't any regrets but she didn't pretend she hadn't lost something with her marriage and motherhood, and on New Year's Eve, with the flute of Champagne before her and Adam nudging the plate of chocolate biscuits towards her, she still missed the way it had been, Mr. Foyle and Sergeant Milner and Sam Stewart, a trio that no longer existed and never could, for all they saw Christopher regularly and Edith sent a letter every few months, perhaps the smallest company of the war but to her mind, one of the finest. It was Paul who had left first, marrying Edith, taking the position in Brighton, eager to be his own man which no one could blame him for, but it put him curiously out of reach, a sort of ghost. She was starting to feel frankly melancholy, so she set down the wine and took up a biscuit, letting Adam's fond smile take the place of the bubbles' tickle, the bittersweet taste of the chocolate reminding her of Milner's glance.


End file.
